hi, its me florian. last year i turned 40 and started an experiment. no news. no fu*** news anymore! i woke up after having my cell phone up and running with news sites CNN, BBC and others. i fell asleep still reading those sites. it was an addiction which didnt even please me. a total waste of time i thought and BOOM i deleted all the bookmarks and ... waited. nothing. a bit of an itchy feeling to check them sites again but, hey. it worked. just like back in 1996 when i through out my TV. same thing. went from stupid ads to amazing movies on DVD's or torrents.

at the same time i started following the pod casts of Tim Ferris. inspirational. exciting. new. reading a lot of his posts and listening to his interviews while spinning wheels. wow. how easy to acquire loads of knowledge and experience from those people.

fell in love with this openness towards sharing what you learned on the way. fell in love with the stories. and then. amazon. click to buy. yep. the books just flew in like mosquitoes. ordered a dozen of them and then. read. and read. and read. such a beautiful way to learn. much better than reading blogs or anything else. so much details and so much depth of information.

read Ed Catmull's Creativity.Inc or Ben Horowitz's last one. great ones. next i may order Steve Jobs. but the one which got me the most was Eric Ries's Lean Startup. clean, easy to understand and soooo true. just the way things should be done. and then listening to Steve Blank's videos totally got me hooked on the lean development and all its ideas.

so i thought why not just following their concepts and exchanging the idea with friends we thought why not just going public. public with the entire process building a brand from scratch. the blog was put up in a matter of hours. and now we will (not see where we will end up) but much more we shall carefully watch each step and we walk. and if there are dark corners or paths in the maze we are going to discover - just stop, think, learn and decide where to go next. the final destination is set by the quality and outcome of the conversation between all people involved. not just us but more importantly you. and you.

welcome to the crowd experiment

identifying the identity of..

.collective media blog.

a bunch

of good friends all over the place. living in NYC, Berlin, Hong Kong, Vienna, Bangkok, Joburg, Sydney and soon somewhere else. filled up with ideas from head to toe. always too busy to do what we actually want to do. but hey, beat it. go for what's not yet done. a conversational project. let cities talk. and let's call it DWNTWN